Chapter 798: Revelation Amidst Fury
Arthur lay on his back, the coarse, granular soil pressing against the folds of his scorched clothing, his lungs straining with every breath as steam rose from the healing burns on his skin.
For a long moment, he simply stared up at the alien sky above him, his mind caught between lucidity and chaos.
He recalled the roar of the cosmic blast swallowing his ship and space cracking open like a shattered mirror.
Now, all he could hear was his own breath, the slow, unsteady rhythm of his heart, and the distant, soft howl of wind moving across the barren landscape.
He didn’t know how long it took, but he was eventually able to push himself up and stare into the distance, his eyes catching sight of the remnants of the destroyed realm, an image of what had just transpired that would linger for months.
"What the hell just happened...?" he whispered aloud, more to himself than to the Ego Weapons with him.
"Where... where did everything go wrong?"
There was no immediate answer.
Neither Celestia nor Lostvayne spoke as they were just as clueless as he was.
And so, for a moment, there was nothing but the weight of confusion pressing against Arthur’s chest, heavier than the planets he had seen ripped apart by gravitational shockwaves.
It’s often said that witnessing the large-scale manifestation of a phenomenon can deepen one’s comprehension of the universal laws behind or related to it.
And now, having been at the epicentre and still gazing upon the lingering explosion of the realm’s destruction, an event that would scar the stars for years, Arthur could feel his understanding of Destruction begin to deepen, if only slightly.
He was on the verge of enlightenment, but it remained just out of reach.
Because though Arthur had witnessed the destruction... he did not understand it.
He didn’t grasp the cause behind this destruction, and because of that lack of understanding, destruction reluctantly held back its secret.
Enlightenment was not given.
But the answer, though Arthur could not see it, was simple.
Arthur had done what he could. He had tried not to take the Seed Engine and leave the realm hollow.
He had substituted it with something of equivalent magnitude, something with enough energy to support the framework of the realm.
He had waited, he had tested stability, he had ensured that, at least in the region around him, the realm had adapted and accepted the change. He had not rushed the process with arrogance or carelessness.
But the truth was cruel in its precision, and the truth was this:
The realm had not fully reconfigured.
At the time Arthur had begun to leave, he didn’t know that only around 30% of the realm’s total structure had been affected by the new energy signature.
Make no mistake, the energy signature was stable and was indeed overwriting the mixture of the Planet + Seed Engine’s energy that the realm previously ran on.
But Arthur and Lostvayne had made one critical misjudgement, not of action or method, but of scale.
They had worked based on the speed of energy propagation they had seen, and with the knowledge that the wave of energy would ripple across the realm at velocities faster than light, since cosmic energy signatures were not bound by the same limitations as physical movement.
But that assumption had been wrong.
The Seed Engine’s energy had left its imprint far deeper into the realm than estimated, and the Spatial Law Crystal, though potent, needed time to overwrite it.
The further out the wave of energy propagated, the slower it became.
As such, the speed that Arthur, who was at the origin, had based his calculations on was wrong.
So, as Arthur had departed the adapted region and journeyed toward the realm gate, the majority of the realm, still reliant on the previous core combination, began to lose cohesion.
It wasn’t immediate.
Energy reserves in certain areas that had not been replaced or overwritten ran low, and they didn’t receive the energy they were calibrated to work with. Spatial equilibrium was destabilised, and micro-fractures in dimensional stability opened up like unseen wounds.
And the gravitational weight of the entire framework, planets, stars and their gravities, tugged at those fractures until they spread.
By the time Arthur had crossed 70% of the distance to the gate, the cracks had become canyons, and the energy voids had become vacuums.
Soon, a great portion of the realm’s architecture concluded that a part of the object it had depended on was gone, and the substitute’s energy hadn’t reached it in time.
Collapse was no longer gradual. It became instant.
The destruction of the realm destroyed one of the nearby planets with a permanence anchor, and the explosion of temporal energy caused a distortion in reality that completely deleted that entire star system from time itself.
Arthur’s actions were indeed the trigger that led to the destruction of that realm, even though destruction had never been his intent.
Everything he did was meant to avoid exactly that outcome. He understood the risk of replacing a portion of the realm’s core and took steps to mitigate it. He replaced it with something equally powerful, monitored the results, confirmed stability within the immediate region, and only departed once he was reasonably sure the realm had adapted.
But while his judgment had been responsible, it was also flawed.
He had misjudged the timeframe.
Arthur wasn’t the best expert on space. His Authority over the law was only at the Low-Rank level.
Perhaps if he’d had a higher level of comprehension, he might have been able to measure the propagation rate correctly and realise that the speed would slow the further out it went.
Perhaps he could have passively detected the risk still lurking in the regions untouched by the new energy’s signature.
But that was not the case.
He did what he believed was right with the knowledge and tools he had, and in the end, it simply wasn’t enough.
So, could you still say it was his fault? Yes.
But at the same time, it really wasn’t.
It was the universe’s rulebook he simply hadn’t read the right page of in time.
But there was someone else who didn’t know that, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have cared in the slightest about Arthur’s circumstances.
Arthur’s confused mind was snapped back to focus by his instincts. His Gravity Authority instantly activated, and he formed a barrier above just as a beam of dark brown divinity descended, completely obliterating the planet he was on in a devastating explosion.
|You bastard!!|
The voice roared louder than the blast itself, and Arthur immediately drew Lostvayne, swinging it upward as a massive fist tore through the flames, aimed squarely at his face.
The blow collided with Lostvayne with a space-distorting impact, and behind it was a furious Kalvaro, roaring,
|I should have killed you on sight!!!|
Divinity surged through his arm, and a second impact followed, smashing Arthur backwards into the unstable moon orbiting the shattered planet.
In that instant, all confusion about the realm’s destruction was wiped clean from Arthur’s mind, and he shifted into battle mode, anti-divinity bursting from his body in unrestrained waves as he glared at Kalvaro.
|You wouldn’t have succeeded anyway!|
With that, he launched forward with a force that shoved the moon back in recoil, rocketing toward the enraged Galactic Ruler, who answered with a sweeping surge of divinity that tore through space.
Arthur didn’t hesitate to throw out a serious attack with all the energy he could muster in that instant.
’Moon Split.’
His sword came down from above, unleashing a slash of destruction energy that tore through the wave of dark brown divinity and hurtled straight towards Kalvaro.
Kalvaro immediately crossed his arms in front of his chest and conjured a thick barrier of divinity to block the attack, bracing himself as the destructive slash crashed into the shield. But just as he focused entirely on blocking, Arthur opened his mouth, condensed even more destruction energy within, and in a second, it was a hyper beam piercing through the airless battlefield and tearing straight through Kalvaro’s weakened barrier, aimed directly at his face.
However, right before the beam could make contact, something condensed rapidly in front of Kalvaro, instantly forming a second shield that absorbed the breath attack entirely, reducing it to a flicker of sparks, with the only consequence being a small knockback that pushed Kalvaro backwards a few metres through space.
At the sight of that energy, Arthur’s eyes widened slightly. "Cosmic energy...?"
Kalvaro, perhaps catching Arthur’s muttered words, immediately looked up, his eyes wide with realisation.
"You... you saw it," he said, and in the same breath, came the unspoken revelation.
Kalvaro possessed Cosmic Superiority.
Arthur hadn’t been able to tell during their first meeting, not even the slightest.
In other words, Kalvaro was skilled enough to suppress and regulate cosmic energy’s natural reaction to beings that possess cosmic superiority. The cosmic energy around him had been completely stable, showing no signs of adhering to his presence by default.
Arthur, too, had mastered that level of control, which was precisely why Kalvaro hadn’t realised at the time that Arthur was Sub Cosmic.
But now, the fact that Kalvaro had openly utilised cosmic energy, and the fact that Arthur had been able to perceive it, meant that both of them were now aware of each other’s cosmic superiority.
Clearly, Arthur hadn’t been the only one hiding his cards.
The revelation of Kalvaro’s Cosmic superiority quickly alerted Arthur to a far grimmer reality. An Inferior-Stage Mid-Tier Deity who possessed cosmic superiority was far stronger than a typical one, so Kalvaro’s power was at least 20-30% greater than Arthur had originally estimated.
